Along North America's West Coast, winter sea level pressure is a top-down driver of coastal upwelling, precipitation, and river discharge. Remarkable coherence among these geophysical parameters induces covariance of biological productivity across marine and terrestrial ecosystems, as evidenced by growth-increment chronologies of fish, clams, and trees. Robust paleoenvironmental records indicate that these biologically-relevant winter climate patterns are dominated by low-frequency, 40-60 year periodicities at higher latitudes.

The image of stilt houses built along lake shores, thus avoiding the floods, is one of the most striking from central European archeology. It comes from the preservation of most of the bearing structures in wood, creating the so-called “field of posts”, due to the wet and anoxic environment where they were buried for millennia.